A hammam of an experience

A weekly ritual for the Moroccans is to make a visit to a hammam, their version of a bath house but much much different. The genders are separated of course and they immediately ask you to take your clothes off. Men must leave their skivvies on and women are given the option to go naked, which is surprising considering many are so covered up in public that you can't even see their eyes. Once freed of your clothes the attendant leads you through a series of rooms then instructs you to sit on the bare wet floor with other bathers. They grab 3 buckets of varying water; scalding hot, hot, and bareable and with a scrubby exfoliating mitt start rubbing your skin away. For me it felt like a good scratching but Steve said his experience was excruciatingly painful. Then they pull you to lay on the floor for your ALL over body scrub.

The lady that was attending to me only had underwear on and laid my head in her lap. After a bit I got to understand that a slap on the stomach was to turn to face down and a slap on the buttock was to flip over to the front. Then she dowsed a bucket of water over my head. Surprising how much hotter water is when someone else is throwing it on you. That was followed by the soaping. The most awkward moment wasn't when she moved my undies aside to get EVERYwhere, but when she held my arm outstretched to sud my side and my hand was helplessly playing patty cake with her breasts. She didn't blink an eye and just finished rubbing nonchalantly. During this whole time the other women are alternating scrubbing each other not a bit shy about staring at the foreigner being pushed around like a rag doll. It was such an odd situation that I had to laugh now and then.

Apparently for the men they stretch you like they're wringing out a wet towel and punch you a few times before scrubbing you pink and telling you to leave.

It's typical for Moroccans to bathe in hammams for 2hrs. Entrance is $5 and the "massage" is $2. There are nicer pricier ones in hotels but we wanted to go to a local one first. The sanitation was not even questionable because there was no doubt that it wasn't, but I got used to it after a few buckets of wood heated water. It felt good walking out of there but we immediately went back to the hotel to take a shower. Hey, we're tourists.

Meet me in Morocco

Overlooking the Fes medina (old walled city), a maze of 9000+ tiny corridors winding around each other.
We stumbled across this little bakery in Tangier when we noticed this guy breaking up old furniture and stuff and throwing it down a stairway. Of course, we followed and learned that it works like this: people dont have their own ovens so much in the old town so they make dough, cookies, cakes, peppers, whatever- and bring it to one of the communal bakeries like this where the baker finishes the job. Amazing the amount and variety of stuff he pulled out of the little oven opening. Super friendly guy and he gave us some pretty decent bread straight out of the oven. The only question we had was what kid didnt get his meal that night! Kidding, turns out the bakeries recently started selling their own bread to supplement income.Oh and the pile of furniture and wood is great. Anything that burns is stacked outside and used to fuel the fire. Anything.

OK, heres the one youve been waiting for. No photoshop required unless someone wants to add a desert and harem. Enjoy:

The perfect thing to do in Tarifa, Spain

say Yes.

Things not to do in Tarifa, Spain

This was NOT our second attempt at sailing, but made us think twice about taking the ferry from this harbor to Morocco! In case it;s not clear in the picture, that is NOT the reflection of a boat I am looking at.

Tarifa is one of the border towns in Spain with ferries to Morocco. Mary thinks it is a lot like Santa Barbara because of the hundreds (really) of kiteboards over the beach, the sidewalk cafes and the crazy hair:

Found on a wall overlooking a small beach. I think it says that it is safe to swim without fear of floaters...but we didnt chance it. Some things the lifeguard cant save you from...

Stayin´up late

We´re in Seville now and have taken on the local lifestyle. Since it´s light until nearly 10pm, we eat dinner late, then have dessert even later and then sleep until way too late in the morning. But it has given us time to catch up on the last couple week´s thoughts.

English food is nothing to write home about

… but I guess I am… The fish & chips were good, but we had bangers & mash for the first and last time. They only have two types of bread, white and brown. However they have a myriad of sauces that come in single serving condiment packages available in pubs including brown sauce and mint sauce. The mint sauce was just weird and we were too afraid to try the brown sauce.

-Mary

Above us only sky

That was the tagline for the Liverpool John Lennon Airport. We stayed in a typical hostel with dorm style beds, public kitchen and play areas. It’s comfortable enough and they offer all the tea and toast we can eat which ends up being quite important as our nightly meals. The proprietor grew up at the same time as the Beatles and has all kinds of stories about beating them in a battle of the bands when they were teens and seeing John Lennon tackle a local bully for grabbing his girl. I’m sure he’s told those stories more than a thousand times as evidenced by everyone else in the room getting up and leaving when he started the tales.

We did go to the Beatles´famed Cavern Club (above) and saw a 60´s style pop band play. Yay. Beatles stuff is really everywhere. Penny Lane really has the barber shop, shelter in the middle of the turnabout, etc. Strawberry Field is...well... a field.

Otherwise, Liverpool is just as I imagined England to be, or at least saw in the movie Notting Hill. The residential areas are just rows of red brick buildings with railed stairways leading to the entrance. There are pubs everywhere and people speak a funny, unrecognizable form of English.

What did surprise us was the daylight hours. The sun rose at 4am and set at 9:30pm so it was still light at 10pm, which is what we blame for sleeping as much as we did.

Rain in June? We must be in Portland

By the time we left the bay area we were both exhausted and hoped our stay up north could help catch us up on sleep. Steve’s nephew and dad had arranged for us to play golf in Matt’s company tournament within minutes of landing. Luckily it happened to be the only sunny day in Portland’s summer. That didn’t help my game, but their creative calculating did give me a 42 handicap which was enough to win $5; only to have it taken out of my hands after a re-tally. Steve won $20. The remainder of the four days were spent surrounded by Kleinkes and playing with the kids; Nick (2yr) and Madison (2months).
-Mary

PS- remember, this is a family website.

Tour de Gorge

I had prepared a list of foods to eat while in the bay area, more than could be comfortably consumed in the amount of time we had. Sushi, thai, pluto’s, soufflé omelette, pie, cheesecake, pearl drink, lemonade, to name a few. We had a pretty hectic stay with a seemingly endless list of to dos and people to visit with. Some how I managed to check off my list to satiate my palette and expand my waistline. I think I gained 2.5lbs in 3.5days, not bad. My only regrets were not making it to Jake’s and not going to Nobo a second time. Our time there was so busy that we actually didn’t sleep much or see everyone as much as we had wanted.
Mary

Life in the slow lane

Woah, you’re driving kinda fast aren’t you? Can you not get so close to the other car? Oh my gosh this car accelerates quick, it’s making me nervous. Yep, that’s how it felt to be driving the streets of San Jose after our extended vacation. On the highways it took me a few days to get up to the speed limit. I found myself avoiding the freeways whenever possible and always staying in the right lane cruising five mph slower than the posted speed limit. The 2 months away had aged my driving by 2 decades. At least Steve only drove on the left side once. Without insurance. In a borrowed car.

Homeward Bound

Leaving the Caribbean was difficult, not just because American Airlines changed our flights without informing us so we were 5hrs late for our flight home, but because we had such a great two months on the islands. On our last ferry ride to the airport we reflected on the most memorable portions of our trip:
Favorite town: Las Galeras, Dominican Republic
Favorite activity: Sailing the VIs and napping on floaties
Favorite beach: Playa Rincon, Dominican Republic
Favorite food (non-dessert): Fish ‘n Tings, St. Lucia and parrotfish at Playa Rincon, DR
Favorite dessert: Coconut and chocolate crepe in Martinique
Least favorite incident (Mary): passing out from excessive pineapple consumption
Least favorite incident (Steve): slamming door on Mary’s fingers (uh..steve thinks it was stepping on sea urchin…)
Places we’d most like to go back to: Dominican Republic and St. John’s, USVI
Next time: Sail St. Vincent and the Grenadines

Wreck of the Rhone

Tortola is a quick stop before heading home so we spent our only full day, today, diving the wreck of the Rhone. It was a large British mail boat which ran into Salt Island in the 1860s and split in two. Its bow half sits in 80’ of water and is covered with coral and teeming with life. The visibility was excellent, the water clear, and the sun beaming blue rays beneath the surface. This was our first wreck dive and we were fortunate to pick one that lets you dive through the hull. It was so much fun to maneuver around the openings and supports, with a moderate amount of spookiness. The air from our tanks filled the top of the hull that created a mirrored ceiling, an odd site underwater. There were enormous lobsters tucked away in dark crevices, the size of chubby two year old children, but much more succulent. I kid you not! Unfortunately it's a marine park and the dive master was smart enough to not leave us alone with them.

Pusser's

My first thought upon landing on Tortola in the British Virgin Islands was “ooh, gotta have fish and chips”. This was satiated the next day at lunch at Pusser’s Bar & Grill. Good stuff, highly recommended. But this is where we learned about the rum of the same name. It was a 330 year old British Navy secret recipe. Each sailor was given daily rations of Pusser’s Rum to keep the men's spirits up. It acquired a nickname when the famous Captain Nelson died fighting the battle of Trafalgar. To preserve his body they filled his coffin with the booze. By the time they got back to merry ole England they found that the rum had been drained and dranked by the crew therefore the name Nelson’s Blood. The production was stopped in 1970 and remained a secret until 1979 when the British Navy agreed to a petition to divulge the recipe for limited production.

The Chinese are taking over Dominica

No, really. The first sign was the oddly high number of chinese restaurants in the capital Roseau. In the downtown area, 5x5 blocks, we saw atleast 5. The second clue was all the comments from the locals consistently telling us that they own almost anything. And the final whammy was the state of the art cricket field the PR of China had donated in the capital, where 90% of the labor are chinese.

Keep in mind that the capital looks like somewhere Sally Struthers would shoot a commercial, open sewers, kids hawking fruit instead of being in school, corrugated aluminum homes, big boat in a trashed lot sitting on cement with a tarp over the top and an access hole punch out on the side, ..the works. And on the outskirts is a massive 10,000 capacity cricket field which is widely believed will never see a cricket game. And the kicker? They are in the process of converting an abandoned resort into a chinese school. Mandareole may be the most inunderstandable dialect ever. The mind wobbles.

ahh-LA!!

On our travel we meet all kinds of people, each with unique stories. Life really is like a box of chocolates, you never know which nut you're going to get.

Twice on the ferry between FdF and Anse Mitan we ran into a guy who most memorably longed to return to Los Angeles, which always enunciated with a sigh. He originally left metropolitan France as a teen to dodge the country’s military obligation, which we had never heard of prior. Apparently he spent four illegal years in NY and fifteen in LA, only to return to France for the noble reason of spending time with his family after the dissolution of the draft and amnesty to those who fled. He returned to France only to discover that he left his heart in LA. Having left he could not easily reenter and was trying desperately to go back home and to his friends. In our conversations he made numerous references to his depression and breathed a heavy sigh every time he spoke of the US, especially ahh-LA. He felt France was too tight, stifling, while the freedom he absorbed in the states could no longer comfortably fit in the confines of the French border. In fact he was in Martinique because he thought the weather would remind him more of California. He had effeminate gestures and speech that made us think that he would fit very aptly in ahh-LA. We never made proper introductions, but I felt bad because he’s trying to get into the very place we have left but still call home. Meeting people like this reminds me of how fortunate we are and how we often don’t even realize it. That seems to be a pretty common revelation in most of our travels.

Martinique

We left St. Lucia May 19th for Martinique and John left for home on the 20th. Martinique is a department of France and is very much what you would expect a French island to be like, but friendlier. As civilized and developed as it was, internet was sparse and not entirely reliable. Steve's already mentioned the keyboard issue. He actually asked the girl at the bar counter if they had a regular keyboard and she replied, "No, this is France." Fair enough.

Most of our 13 days here were spent walking around the various coastal towns and floating around on our inflatable loungers. We became quite enamored with that latter activity actually. So much so that we lamented each day that we did not get to do so. And miss it terribly now.

One of the towns we visited was Sainte Pierre the original settlement and capital of the island until Mt Pelee exploded in 1902 decimating the town and killing all 30,000 inhabitants, the largest number of casualties by a volcano in that century and since. Well, all except for the guy in the drunk tank who was protected by the thick stone walls of his prison. Apparently he wasn’t necessarily the only survivor, but Barnum circus touted him as such. Makes for a better story without the correction. Sainte Pierre was partially rebuilt and is now a picturesque coastal town with its palm lined beach, brightly colored buildings, and Mt Pelee hovering overhead in the near distance. It was a quiet town with most of the bustling done by the tourists shuttling in their air-conditioned buses from one ruin to the next. We did our own shuffle in the blazing heat and made our away around to the see the remains of the theatre, church, and prison. They appeared to just have left the rubble where they fell and one of the pieces of the church’s arches made a nice recliner.